President Trump’s questioning of immigration into the United States from what he crudely called “shithole” countries masks a more vexing question:

What makes a country, the place or the people? Does “the country” create the man or does the man make the country?

To listen to the deformed logic of the president’s detractors, it’s the former: the “country” makes the person. No sooner does an African or Haitian immigrant wash up on American shores—courtesy of random quotas, lotteries and other government grants of privilege and protection—than the process of cultural and philosophical osmosis begins. American probity and productivity soon become his own.

Easily one of the most controversial thinkers on the causes of underdevelopment in Africa, Etounga-Manguelle, a former adviser to the World Bank, contends that “What Africans are doing to one another defies credulity. Genocide, bloody civil wars, and rampant violent crime suggest African societies at all social levels are to some extent cannibalistic.” Why? In part, because of the inveterate values held by so many Africans.

Etounga-Manguelle and scholars like him, cited in “Into The Cannibal’s Pot,” are responding to an “explanatory vacuum” that has opened up among honest academics.

All have been willing to admit that constructs like racism, discrimination, and colonialism no longer serve as credible causal factors in divining underdevelopment and delinquency.

None has been called upon to enlighten the greater public.

In such intellectually candid circles, the intellectual “vacuum” is being filled with reference to culture, namely the “values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in a society.” …

… Human behavior is, indubitably, mediated by values. Nevertheless, we’d be intellectually remiss to deny that the cultural argument affords a circular, rather than a causal, elegance: people do the things they do because they are who they are and have a history of being that way.

What precisely, then, accounts for the unequal “civilizing potential,” as James Burnham called it, that groups display? Why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwifed Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control?

Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place?

… the Senate bill’s cuts to individual income taxes are to be phased out after 2025, to keep the costs down. What is initially a tax cut for most lower- and middle-earners will turn into a tax increase, because of changes to how tax brackets will be adjusted for inflation.

UPDATE (12/26):

Millionaires on average will get an extra $69,660 boost from Trump #TAXPLAN. Those with less than $10,000 will get an extra $10 to play with. … Things change however once 2025 rolls around. If no change is made, what were tax cuts will become tax hikes, even relative to current law. A majority of Americans in a decade’s time will then pay higher taxes, including 69.7% of the middle quintile.

“We have it in our power, should we so choose, to lift millions from poverty, to help our citizens realize their dreams, and to ensure that new generations of children are raised free from violence, hatred, and fear.”—President Trump in his speech to the UN (9/19/2017), presumably speaking about the UN.

WRONG! The State can’t pick people up, it can only pick their pockets. It’s up to individuals, families and communities of faith to do the heavy lifting. In other words, it is up to civil society.

If we must segregate intellectuals, then Thomas Sowell is a thinker, as is Walter E. Williams. But not this man. Alas, Coates’ fortunes are not merit-based. Yes, how does the adulation Coates receives square with his accusations, made into a career calling, of our racism, yours and mine?

Hayes attempted diplomatically, 6:30 minutes in, to refute Coates’ put down of all whites who voted Trump, but Hayes backed down from being intellectually forceful. Besides, Coats was unable to respond to the host. Simply couldn’t.

As to “America’s founding sins,” as Coats calls slavery. I was not party to that, so I reject his collective guilt. We all should.

UPDATE I: On Gab, someone point out that, “African-American vernacular is a legitimate dialect of English, no different than southern or Australian or any other dialect. That doesn’t make it inferior.”

REPLY: This cultivated African-American dialect was, I believe, absent in the 1950s through the 1960s and even the 70s. It’s a racial, not regional, dialect, adopted, it would seem, artificially for political ends.

UPDATE II:DON on Gab: Having not been alive in those decades I can’t personally refute that (ridiculous, I mean come on) claim, but have a listen to this 1956 interview with a Black American and tell me it doesn’t sound quite a bit like blacks today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvEE9zdHpcY
REPLY: The most educated of blacks once sounded like educated Americans, not like the exotic exhibits you make them out to be. Do yo think people should strive to speak great English, the language of the founders & of the founding docs? Or bastardize the language to pidgin english? Leftists are with you.